Winnicott: poetry and reality

Abstract

Winnicott’s short comment on a poem by Rabindranath Tagore points out his divergences from Freud and Klein with regard to the interpretation of cultural creations as well as showing his theory of the mutual emergence of subject and external reality in the intermediate space of experience and communication. From the interval between perception and concept arises another understanding of the world-and-thought game. From this perspective, some poems are examined here for the unique way in which they produce truth resulting from the connection between poetic language and reality.